A Devotion from William Sangster
It is by grace you have been saved, through faith.
—Ephesians 2:8
What do we mean by grace? The old definition called it “the free, unmerited favor of God.” On that definition I cannot improve. It means that at the heart of all true communion with God there lies this deep truth, that God himself took the initiative. He loves us better than we can ever love him. He loves us with a love that does not depend on any answering love of ours. We do not have to earn his love any more than we earned our mothers’ love. We have only to receive it.
Always the initiative is from God! When you first came to him, you came because he first drew you. The very faith by which you lay hold of him is not of yourself, this also is a gift of God. Nor is it only in the beginning that your salvation is God’s free gift. Every onward step you have made in your spiritual pilgrimage has been possible by some bestowing of his grace. Even the life of holiness, to which all the time he is seeking to bring you—the Christlike quality that he wants to repeat in all of his children—even that you do not have to achieve but to receive. It is a gift of God.
There is in us something that rejects the idea of this free and generous forgiving. Of course it is pride, the deadliest of all the deadly sins. Bernard Shaw may in some things, I suppose, be taken as an example of the modern mind. He says, “Forgiveness is a beggar’s refuge. We must pay our debts.” So speaks the modern world, but, my dear friends, we cannot pay our debts. We will never be able to pay our debts to God. As our spiritual predecessors saw so clearly, the only language that we can honestly use in the presence of our awful debt is this prayer:
Just as I am, without one plea
But that Thy blood was shed for me,
And that Thou bidd’st me come to Thee,
O Lamb of God, I come.
—Charlotte Elliott
In response to this coming, the free, unmerited favor of God comes to us, cancels the debt, imputes the righteousness of Christ to sinners such as we are, and progressively, as we live with him, also imparts that righteousness.
It is a part of the Holy Spirit’s work, too, to make us holy. He sets out not only to justify us, but to sanctify us, and all the time the whole work is by grace.